A mock-up of the Twilight I, Tahoe, prints to be released within the next month.

Trolling through my own archives I see that two years ago today as Within The Frame was just about to come out I gave away the cover photograph from Within The Frame on beautiful 16×20 APC gallery wrap canvas. So I’d like to do something like that again. In the next month I’m going to be releasing the first of a very small series of  limited edition prints. In order to do that I’ve had a few test prints made and the final one is gorgeous.  But the thing is, I’ve really got no use for the print. I have no walls. The closest thing I have to my own home is a Land Rover Defender, Jessie. Very little wall space in Jessie.

So, leave a simple comment, and in an unspecified number of days I’ll close the comments, randomly draw a name and then sign this print as an un-numbered artist’s print, and mail it to you. The print is 16×22 printed with archival quality on heavy 20×26 watercolour stock.It’s gorgeous. You’ll be able to buy one of one hundred of these prints, but there will be only one of these. It’s the first time I’ve printed and put my work out there for a while, and you as a community have been so profoundly supportive since my accident. Thank you. But if I keep falling off walls, now is the time to get in on my printed work.

Leave a comment and just make sure I have your email address and name in there so I can notify the winner and get a mailing address. Thanks again for your support, encouragement, and patience – during this time. I’m grateful.

Until then, Corwin’s just engaged the random number generator and chosen the three winners of the one-year Livebooks subscription, and those winners are below. But for those that didn’t win, LiveBooks has given us an 20% discount. It expires at the end of February 2011, on the day I leave for the big road trip with Jessie, so act sooner than later. If you want in, go to LiveBooks.com and use this code when you sign up and checkout: pixelated20

The 20% discount is also good for a custom designed site. Anyone interested in discussing the custom options should touch base with J Sandifer at 888.458.3678 or j@livebooks.com

But three of you need no discount, cause your site is free. Those three people are:

#42 Ann Klein
#364 Jeff Bartlett
#244 Steve Schnabel

Congrats. If you’re one of the winners there’s an email en route to you with a code. Or there will be. Promise.

When, earlier this year, I started looking for a new way to present my online work, Livebooks really hooked me. When I bit the bullet I was really impressed with their service and the quality of people there. I won’t do a sales job on Livebooks, because I think we all want different things. But, I do want to say using Livebooks was everything I wanted – clean, professional, and customizable design, easy to use, and cheaper than it once was. I also wanted the sites to work on the iPad, and Livebooks has built-in HTML companion sites as a standard feature. Most important to me was that my photographs were large and looked great and stood on their own. The Livebooks template I chose does that for me. Anyways, I’m a fan and as I was having coffee with a friend last night I was reminded that when Livebooks said, How can we help you? I said, how’d you like to give a 1 year subscriptions to me and someone in my community, they said absolutely. I asked for one, they gave me 5. I have 3 of them to give away right now.

Want a year of Livebooks?  All I want you to do is go to their site – LIVEBOOKS.COM – and poke around. look at the available templates and leave a comment here telling me which one you like best.  In roughly a week-ish, I’ll announce three, randomly chosen winners. Good luck. And huge thanks to Livebooks for being so cool about this.

**January 14, 12:38 pm PST, the giveaway is now closed and winners -  and a limited time 20% discount – have been announced HERE.

The latest in the Craft & Vision eBook line-up is now out. Close To Home, Finding Great Photographs in Your Own Backyard, is a 37-page book about the challenges of finding the extraordinary in what we’ve come to see as mundane. We touched on this recently in Kathmandu while I was struggling to find my vision, having a tough time seeing the place in new ways. So many people assume that the most exotic places are low-hanging fruit, and to a degree they are. But what if you live in that exotic place? At some point Kathmandu gets mundane and the idea of flying somewhere new is really appealing. Problem is, there’s likely a photographer right now in that “somewhere new” and he’s thinking the same thing – about getting out, pursuing the new, the obvious.

The images are out there. It’s not the scenery that needs changing; it’s our vision of things. It needs a tweak, a tune-up. And this book is a great step in that direction.

Stuart Sipahigil is a talented photographer; we traveled to Italy together on a workshop last year and I was immediately impressed by his character and his eye. Come to think of it, he was on the same trip as Eli Reinholdtsen. Must have been something in the wine… Anyways, you’ll love this book. It’s packed with great images, almost all of them taken within a few miles of Stuart’s home, and the text is filled with thoughts and ideas and creative exercises to help you see things a little differently. It’s one of those books that inspires you to get out there and gives you enough information and push to get you out of the ruts we all so easily fall into.

Special Offer on PDFs
For the first five days only, if you use the promotional code HOME4 when you checkout, you can have the PDF version of Close to Home for only $4 OR use the code HOME20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more PDF ebooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes start at 1:00am PST, October 28, 2010 and expire at 11:59pm PST November 1, 2010.

Added Bonus! This release comes hot on the heals of a new, and generous relationship with Livebooks. I’m in the middle of rebuiding my website galleries and my experience with Livebooks has been amazing. Everyone that buys Close To Home during the discount period will be entered to win a one-year subscription to Livebooks, hosting included.  Livebooks is the kind of company I love to work with and I’d love to set one of our readers up with them as well. You can buy one book, you can buy 5, but one of them has to be Stuart’s, and you’re in the draw. Good luck!

I’m almost finished. A couple days ago I invited people on Twitter to feel free to watch the site as I built the galleries. If you’re interested, though there’s not much action now – just nearly completed galleries – you can find the galleries here at this temporary URL – http://davidduchemin.sites.livebooks.com/ I always hated those Under Construction pages people put up on their sites, so feel free to poke around while I sweep up the dust. *Update, October 27 – The galleries are now live at http://gallery.davidduchemin.com/

Surprisingly, after all my raving about Livebooks, I got a call from them asking if they could help. I said they could and that I’d like a Livebooks subscription to giveaway to my readers. We’re working on details but I’ll be giving away a couple Livebooks subscriptions in the coming days, one connected to the release of the next eBook this Thursday, another with no strings attached when I launch the galleries officially. In the mean time, feel free to drop by.

Hey everyone! It’s Corwin again. As promised, David is awarding one lucky commenter (chosen at random) with the FULL Adobe Creative Suite 5 MASTER COLLECTION! There’s no fooling around on this one – it’s a $2600 piece of software – this is serious business. And the time has come. Cue the band.

The winner is: Molly Cichy

Thanks again to Adobe for sharing the love with this community with no strings attached.

Hey everyone! Corwin here. As promised, anyone who purchased the ICELAND Print & Process ebook before 11:59pm PST on September 12th would be entered into a draw for a 20×30 limited edition canvas print of VAST, ICELAND 2010. With David enroute to Kashmir I had the very difficult task of randomly choosing a winner; it was grueling work putting everyone’s names on tiny slips of paper. Finally, after hours of toil I reached into the hat, swirled my hand around, and to the blast of trumpets and the flutter of descending doves I pulled out the chosen name: Scott Sante!

As David mentioned, we’ve just celebrated Craft & Vision’s 1st anniversary and we wanted to do something fun. Our friends at APC are going to make this 20×30 gallery wrap canvas and ship it to our winner. Thanks everyone for your passion and support for what we’re doing with these ebooks. If you’ve gotten a chance to read ICELAND please leave a comment or review on the product page.

The fine print? You have to leave a comment, and in the right places leave your name and email address. For bonus points you can tell people about the amazing photography education resources available for the ridiculously low price of $5 over at the Craft & Vision website, but that’s more for the keeners who do this kind of thing because they like to, not because they have to. Leave your name once, tell the world, that’s all. It’s an honour system thing. Well, the “tell the world” part is. The “leave your name and email address” part is actual pretty mandatory.

So there you have it. Huge thanks to Adobe for sharing the love with this community with no strings attached.

Update – The giveaway is now closed. Winner to be announced ASAP.

Last month we launched the new Craft & Vision website and invited readers past and present to leave honest reviews of the books. As a thank you for the participation we put an iPad on the line and this morning I’m announcing the lucky winner of that iPad. So huge congrats to Pam Idel! Pam, we’ll drop you a line and get details but I think we’re going to send a gift certificate, so if you want to upgrade or pick something more useful to you, then you’re free to do that.

The rest of you? Huge thank you! It was a year ago I went to Thailand with The Legendary H and he planted the seeds of this idea in my mind, and when TEN came out it changed the direction of things for me and got me involved in a larger community than I ever imagined – and you all are that community, so thank you. We’ve made our purpose to align ourselves with the amateurs – the ones who do this for the love of it (regardless of whether you also make money at this) and I hope our passion comes through. We’re committed to keep offering inspiration and education for ridiculous prices; if you keep reading, we’ll keep looking for new photographers and new books.

Now, the big news for those of you who didn’t win – and there are a few hundred of you -  because I’m feeling the love and I had a nice chat with the folks over at Adobe, they’ve put a full CS5 Master Collection on the line for us. Mac or PC, depends on who wins. This is the mothership of collections, and the one I use daily. Last I checked this was retailing for $2600, so it’s up there as one of the most expensive give-aways we’ve ever had. Stay tuned later this week for the full details!

Wow, for a country just off the coast of Canada, it sure seemed to take a while to get back from Iceland. 24 hours of traveling, 2 border crossings, three airlines, and a couple hours of sleep later, and I’m home. What an amazing trip. This trip was a chance for me to do some creative exercises, get some down time (and by that I mean, working like a dog to keep up with Dave Delnea), and create a small body of work that I could add to my portfolio. I also wanted to come out of it with enough images to show, and lessons learned that I could teach and though I don’t know when it’ll release, the next Craft & Vision eBook out of me personally will be in The Print & The Process series and it’ll be about the Iceland trip. I’ve been chipping away at it, and I’m really excited to work on it, as these books are themselves part of the creative process for me. I’ll keep you posted, but don’t hold your breath, it’ won’t be for a little while.

On July 16th I posted a thing about the new book, Vision & Voice. A bunch of y’all put your names in the magic hat for signed copies and I’ve just drawn three names – the numbers that came up were #49, #166, and #273 – so congrats to Susan, Jennifer, and Noel. Emails have been sent, when you get me your shipping addresses I’ll fire these babies off to you!

While we’re on the topic of Vision & Voice, I’ve got what I hope is an appropriate and understated request. If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, and can recommend it, would you leave a review on Amazon.com? I’m not asking for anything more than your enthusiasm and your honesty, but as it turns out this kind of thing makes a big difference in the world of books.

OK, more later. I have bags to unpack, a tent to dry out, sensors to clean, and a mound of “I’ve been away from the office for almost two weeks” to get through. Nice to be back, I missed y’all.